If you are looking for a musical about living with guilt in a dystopian world after an environmental apocalypse, then documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s debut fictional feature, “The End” (2024), is for you. A group of people live underground, and their routine is disrupted when the Girl (Moses Ingram) discovers them. As she tries to fit into their world because the alternative is returning to the surface for a horrible, solitary, inevitable death either from the heat or starvation, each of the inhabitants reflect on the choices that they made that led them to this point. Will they be able to live with themselves and each other?
For those familiar with Oppenheimer’s work, specifically “The Act of Killing” (2012) and “The Look of Silence” (2015), no one would expect anything remotely conventional. The music is soaring, and lyrical tone sounds expansive and optimistic, but cinema is a visual medium. Everyone is jumpy and apologetic. No offense intended to the actors, but a couple look like lizard people wearing makeup and wigs to resemble human beings. The pallor is grey, and the light sickening though the set shows that they want for nothing. Each season, they swap out original masterpieces to mark the change in time. Oppenheimer never spends sustained time on one character. It is an ensemble. If there is a protagonist, it is surprising that it is not the Son (George MacKay—what a year), the youngest, treasured member of the family. During a drill, he fails, and the dialogue embodies his worst fear, “Everyone died.” Almost everyone adores him, especially the way that he unquestioningly supports their view of their place in the world and parrots their vision: Father (Michael Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton), Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), a former chef, alcoholic and mother, and Butler (Tim McInnerny), nicknamed Butterball, a gay man who never found love and is willing to sacrifice his life for Father. Even so, his existence disrupts their peace. Even though he is adult, he behaves like a child. Only Doctor (Lennie James) directs any hostility towards him.
If someone used a stopwatch, Mother probably gets the most screentime, and she is a foil for Girl, a glimpse into whom Girl will become or who Mother was. On the surface, Mother is welcoming and gentile, but behind closed doors, she is an undermining viper, a potential mother-in-law/boy mom from hell who prefers to rule the roost. Oppenheimer and Swinton make a character that could be written off as awful into someone sympathetic regardless of how reprehensible she is. Choosing survival, a natural impulse, over others, including family, still feels like the original sin. If Girl is an exception and is permitted to stay, it becomes an indictment of their earlier exclusion. Even though the Son was not a part of killing people who tried to live there or exclude others, he is aligned with their impulse. Everyone should obviously conclude that Girl solves an obvious problem, the Son will have someone to live with instead of go mad alone, but that solution does not outweigh her implicit condemnation to their conscience.
Even though Girl has a tighter grasp of morality and history, she is willing to do anything to fit in, and her choices are nightmarish, especially since Son is not an ideal partner, and she is aware that the slightest misstep could result in a family member demanding her exile, i.e. death. While everyone pretends to be welcoming, the initial hostility hangs quietly over every pleasant exchange. There is a clash between the group’s playing at polite society and going through the motions, and Girl not figuring out how to hide her emotions, including shock at the family’s revisionist history. She does not intend to disrupt, but by navigating the world in an honest way, she challenges them. Mother and Friend teach her how to exist in their world. She has zero interest in challenging the status quo. Girl and Mother’s dynamic works on multiple levels. It feels like a commentary between Black and white women, but that would be a mistaken oversimplification that hides how Mother feels despite acting like the grand lady of the manor. Swinton plays Mother as so shaken and separate from the men in her family, even her beloved son, that she forgets her lines at the group’s first dinner with Girl.
Ingram may have the better voice, but the real standout in “The End” is Shannon. Because Shannon often plays villain, it makes sense during the beginning of the film why everyone seems so startled whenever Father appears despite his gentle, kind demeanor. Girl sparks a change in Father as he relents on his sterner, exclusionist policy, which only Friend approves of, but no one else likes though no one dares to challenge Father. There are clues during Son’s first reading of his father’s biography. He was in energy and worked in Indonesia but appears distressed when a detail emerges about his time there based on a news clipping about alleged human rights violations, which Father vehemently denies. Father sees himself as a romantic and is still in love with his wife. Shannon is best suited to the musical format whether going solo or his duets with McInnerny, which are poignant and moving. As the cracks begin to show, Shannon knows how to incrementally reveal his characters’ cruelty without exploding into excess like lesser actors—think Tobey MacGuire. He shows how the man who adores his wife and child is still the same man who controls everyone in the bunker. Shannon is the natural heir to Christopher Walken by being a song and dance reprise to Max Schreck.
Oppenheimer’s use of mirrors is a great way to show the separation between characters who seem close or their fractured selves. Also the stark, lifeless environment compared to the relative warmth of the living space is a broader way to reflect the family’s relationship to each other. Initially they seem like a unified, loving front. The Son matures and questions his upbringing. His experience with the Girl opens his eyes to honest emotion instead of only walking on eggshells to do what others expect. His epiphany defrosts the rest of the family, and initially it seems promising that they will rediscover love for each other, but that would require confronting past hurt and mending it through accountability, which is impossible. Eventually flashes of his earlier hostility to Girl’s existence “now you’re killing mine [family]” reappears as the family tries to use the Girl as a substitute for the Son. Instead of a love story, the Son and Girl have less freedom and fewer options other than playing a role though MacKay and Ingram’s acting reflects that they are painfully aware that they are going through the motions to survive the psychological . The Friend is a cautionary lesson of what happens when people stop playing, and Gallagher is a genuine human presence, flawed and open.
“The End” is like all of Oppenheimer’s work. The horrors of humanity must be approached in a furtive way lest it reignites and destroys what remains. Memory is a two-edged sword. Feeling and honesty come with a price, and art can nurture it or distract from it, but tyrants are going to tyrant. While it is an unusual New Year’s film, and a first viewing can be hard to get through almost to an inscrutable degree—seriously, how was it obvious that it unfolded in a salt mine, if you are open to it, another rewatch could function as a balm to those unable to fake the funk this holiday season.
